1981 : Billie Jean Queen

The day Billie Jean King came out to the world

On 1 May 1981, in Los Angeles, the press conference room was packed. Billie Jean King, her lawyer Dennis Wasser, her parents Bill and Betty Moffitt, and her husband Larry King were up on the stage. Larry King spoke first and said that Billie Jean wanted to tell the story herself. Then, she spoke to a stunned audience: “I will talk now as I have always talked, from my heart. I’ve always felt it’s important that people have their privacy, and unfortunately someone in my life doesn’t think it’s very sacred. I  did have an affair with Marylin.”

It was earth-shaking. 38-year-old Billie Jean King became the first international athlete to be openly homosexual. She made the headline news in Regan’s conservative America. It was down to the pressure put on her by her former personal assistant Marilyn Barnett, who was her secretary, manager, confidant and, of course, ex-lover at once; they had an affair from 1972 to 1979. Though she had the support of the circuit, BJK lost all her sponsors –worth about $2M– in the next 24 hours. “It was a very tough moment,” she said in 2022 on French TV show C à Vous. The revelation of this secret –which her lawyer had advised her not to tell– got Barack Obama to grant her the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her fight against gender inequalities and for the LGBT+ community in 2009. After her career, she launched the very first all women tournament and founded the Women’s Sport Foundation to promote the next generations of female athletes. She also was a figurehead of the fight against AIDS in the 1990s, while she was also captain of the US Fed Cup team. In her autobiography published in 2022, she explains that she started fighting discrimination when she was 7; for instance, she stopped playing tennis when she noticed that there were only white players dressed in white. She wanted to see other types of people on the courts. It was also a shock for her to see that the MLB baseball teams were all men when she was younger. Legend has it that when her first coach Clyde Walker insisted that kick serves were not for women, she gave it her all to succeed on her first attempt.

That was BJK, a woman whose 1981 press conference paved the way for the likes of Martina Navratilova, Amélie Mauresmo or Daria Kasatkina and made her a political icon. As a response to Vladimir Putin’s 2013 homophobic laws, Barack Obama invited her to join the USA delegation for the 2014 Winter Olympics in… Sochi (Russia). Now 79 years old, she has been in a relationship with Ilana Kloss, her former doubles partner, for 20 years. She told more in an NBC News interview in 2017. “My mother always said: ‘To thine self be true.’” In her autobiography, King says she had promised her mother two things –she would be World No. 1 in tennis, and she would achieve great things. Her mother, who died in 2014, had smiled at her both times and had said: “Alright, honey.”